[richgillett]

The N95 firmware update is incompatible with previous versions, so you can't restore ANY of your information from a memory card. This is despite the instructions telling you to do it!

Be warned! If your N95 is working okay, don't update it. If you have to update it, use the PC suite backup (but note that many users are having problems with the PC suite backup utility).

What are Nokia playing at? This isn't Finnish technical excellence!

[jformn95]

I ran the update and cannot complain ... only a minor thing with maps...rest is all fine and even the restore worked without a problem...

Joe

[danielvlv]

richgillett - sorry but you are wrong, after my actualisation everything is allright

[richgillett]

I've spoken to Nokia and been through the forums here.

I would still strongly advise no one to update to this firmware as it can't restore your numbers and messages from previous firmware versions.

No numbers, no messages :-( Avoid.

[krisq]

Don't spread FUD my friend. I've made a backup to memory card and restore it without a problem after the update to v20.
Everyone who can update, should update. Too many advantages over old firmware.

[willow09]

Looks like a error on your part mate, all my firmware updates have gone smoothly without any problems and all my back up was re-installed fine. Same case for my colleagues.

Anyone who can upgrade to a newer firmware should, as this ensures your device can run all the latest software and of course gets rid of previous firmware bug issues. just use common sense and back up all your stuff even sim contacts (just incase). The N95 is smart, but lets face it not all users are.

Message Edited by willow09 on 09-Feb-2008 06:46 PM

[diesele]

To be fair I have seen a lot saying dont restore an older or branded backup if you have installed latest and/or unbranded software.

Also I am reading a lot about people who it hasnt gone smoothly for, despite doing everything by the book. I'm off to a service centre myself now after a failed V20 upgrade that has killed the phone.

D

[perjobs]

Had the same problem. Used the PC suite backup utilitiy before updatng firmware with NSU. Can not restore contacts, calender posts, landmarks, email accounts etc.

This is complete horror. Be smart and backup we tell each other, but in this case it id not help.

I use windows Vista Home Premium. Anybody have an idea about what to do?

[richgillett]

Thank you for your positive comments from those of you who have not had problems moving to the new firmware. Great! I'm overjoyed for you, that really is excellent news! Yay you!

I recommend not to upgrade. I have searched several forums and many users (over 50) have had this problem in the last few months. I've got my numbers back - solution below. The problem is due to the new firmware not being backwards compatible with some previous firmware. This is why some users have difficulty and others don't.

With the greatest of respect to all the 'counsellors', your advice is completely unhelpful. None of your comments are constructive.

I followed all the instructions from Nokia, just as I have on previous occasions and made a copy of all contents to the memory card. The new firmware DOES NOT keep information from older versions of the firmware. This means for me and many others, we are faced with losing our information, despite following the instructions.

Solution:

Here is what I have done, in order to get the numbers back.

1. Connect the phone in 'USB mass storage' mode to a PC
2. View the (hidden) backup folder on the phone
3. Copy the backup.arc file to the PC (make a folder called backup in your My Documents folder)
4. Download a file from www.x-ren.com - save it into your My Documents folder and run the file - this will break up the file into blocks. In my case this took over a day.
5. One of the files will be your contacts database (see below to find out which)
6. Open the contacts.cdb with Noki (nokisms.googlepages.com) It is a commercial product (I paid £12) - export them to .vcf. This money seems worth it, plus the support from Noki was great.
7. Send the .VCF files back to your phone

I hope this will work for you, it's taken me days. If the firmware upgrade advised to use a PC suite backup, I would have done that.

*The backup parser will split your backup.arc file into hundreds of pieces. Which one is the contacts file? You'll have to find the following text in one of the files "ReplicationCount". To do this, Click Start, then Programs, then Accessories, then Command Prompt.
A. You'll get a black box to type in. Change the folder to your backup folder. To do this type "cd my documents", then
B. Type "find "ReplicationCount" *.* and press enter. The box will then go through all the blocks and one of them will have a line of information next to it, with the word 'ReplicationCount' in it, make a note of the block number and keep it for the next step.
C. Rename the block number to 'contacts.cdb' (To do this, type rename block-50 to 'contacts.cdb' You can then open this contacts.cdb file in Noki.

Constructive comments welcome.

[diesele]

Rich, geat post, but points to nowhere I'd like to go as a consumer user I'm afraid. Nokia should be managing this, without extra cost to customers - not you. D

[alb3530]

---

08-Feb-2008 11:49 PM
richgillett wrote:
The N95 firmware update is incompatible with previous versions, so you can't restore ANY of your information from a memory card. This is despite the instructions telling you to do it!

Be warned! If your N95 is working okay, don't update it. If you have to update it, use the PC suite backup (but note that many users are having problems with the PC suite backup utility).

What are Nokia playing at? This isn't Finnish technical excellence!

---

Restoring backups that contain system configurations from old firmwares is never advisable

[willow09]

Again common sense should tell you to back up everything when performing an update to your firmware. Remember you are wiping the devices software clean and re-installing a newer version, I backed all my information and files to my PC rather than my memory card due to once having a virus on the memory card which was re-installed after a firmware update killing my applications (nothing to do with nokia), It's trial and error thing really when doing updates the NSU is alot better now than when it first got released but is still not perfect and not the most user friendly when compared to the Sony Ericsson Update service.

If your having difficulties and cannot resolve the issue and no threads are helping you on here then just take your mobile to a NSC (Nokia Service Centre) or contact your Service provider.

We can only advise you on here and use reference to our own experiences using the devices, the title councellor, expert or visitor only refers to the amount of messages you have posted or replied to and in no way implies we are employed by nokia or consider ourselves nokia advisors.

Message Edited by willow09 on 14-Feb-2008 12:51 PM

[anastasia]

I'm having the exact same problem as Richard: I did the firmware upgrade (v10.???.??? to v11.???.???) after performing the backup to memory card as the procedures instructed, and restoring from the memory card doesn't restore ANYTHING...and I mean ANYTHING. I've only had my phone since January, so I could conceivably "restore" the majority of my contacts from the SIM chip, but this isn't what a "backup to memory card" and "restore from card" is supposed to mean.

My .arc file is 22+M in size. In addition to the contacts, I would REALLY like my Messaging stuff back. Everything else (such as pix and videos) has been backed up frequently, so I don't believe I've lost anything important that way. It sounds as if Richard's procedures will allow you "access" to the contacts db, but what about the messaging stuff?

I've been on the phone with Nokia Level 2 tech support for a day and a half so far, and it would be REALLY helpful to have someone with more knowledge to assist me. My husband paid A LOT of money for this phone for me, and he was pretty distressed to hear that I was ready to throw it through the window last night because of the amount of time I've spent debugging it. The only thing I haven't tried yet is trying the restore via PC Suite rather than through the phone, and while I'm still going to try this, I'm getting the distinct impression that this will not solve the issue. Was there really a huge format change between firmware versions?

HELP???

[anastasia]

All---

I haven't been able to let this "just go". So...After e-mailing Nokia and talking on the phone several times, I was finally elevated to speaking with a Level 3, who was very nice. I told him that my guess is that since there are different versions of this phone (example: N95, N95-8G, etc.), and there are apparently different versions of the firmware for each, it appears that some of the upgraded firmware is not backwards-compatible with some of the previous versions. The Level 3 said he was sending the information to the programmers to check this out. I also referenced this thread. He hopes to hear something back in a week or 10 days or so, and I've asked to be notified of what they find out.

My bottom line is three things:

1) Short-term: The way to prevent an incompatible backup from ever being made in the first place is to tell people to backup to PC Suite (or some other way that is firmware-independent). In addition, a STRONG note should be posted in the upgrade instructions indicating NOT to use the backup-to-memory-card option due to possible firmware format incompatibilities.

2) Since my belief is that the data is safe and sound but unretrievable in the backup.arc file, Nokia needs to offer a converter to convert from the new firmware format to the old firmware format.

3) Long-term: Create a new firmware version that IS backward-compatible with the old backup.arc format, and if a new format is necessary then the new firmware should perform the conversion automatically.

Keep your fingers crossed that this works out. The N95 is a really neat phone, but this is a really nasty hiccup that needs to be remedied.

[str8isis]

Rich, is there ANY way to get the old firmware back? I REALLY miss the GPS tracking feature. It made it worth the phone!

[cavedb]

I update my N95 by NSU. After update my phone used play video and application it work in a few minute and automatic restart. Give me the way to make my phone work good please.

[reddevil]

Unfortunately, I have just updated my N95's firmware a few days ago. The last time I updated my firmware was sometime last year & I thought that it will be a good time to do it now as my N95 sometimes goes off & back on on its own.

After the update, I noticed that my battery power ran out really fast! From 2 days to maybe 6 hours! This is crazy! Furthermore, after I have recharged the battery & switched on my N95, it prompts me to type in the date & time again!

Any latest news on this?

I really believe Nokia needs to make an official announcement on this big boohoo...

[anastasia]

Good afternoon!

I called Nokia this afternoon because I had not heard back from my last conversation with the Level 3. Unfortunately, it appears that all of the records tracking the conversations with the Level 3 cannot be found, and since I didn't have the name of the Level 3 with whom I spoke, I was told by a very sympathetic Level 2 that the Level 3 could not be located, especially since there were no Level 3s in his area (!). More on this a little bit later.

Over the weekend, I got notification that there was new firmware available for my N95. This is version 20.?.???. I did two things: 1) I backed up my phone to PC Suite and 2) I also backed it up to the memory card. Note that I kept copies of the old backup.arc in multiple places "just in case" there is a future way to restore the information stored in that file. I then upgraded from version 11.?.??? to the new version 20.?.???, and both of these restore processes--to PC Suite and also to/from the memory card--worked as advertised.

So...I copied out (via card reader) the new backup.arc out of the hidden Backup folder, and swapped in the old backup.arc (this is the one from the original 10.?.??? format), to see if the new firmware could read it. Unfortunately, it could not, meaning this whole issue is still unresolved.

Therefore, I called Nokia again (first paragraph above), and when the Level 2 explained that basically my issue wasn't documented, I said, okay, let's start from scratch and do this again so that there is a record. I explained:

- that FOLLOWING THE NOKIA INSTRUCTIONS to backup the contents of the phone TO THE MEMORY CARD (the instructions did NOT say to perform the backup to PC Suite) when upgrading from 10.?.??? to 11.?.??? on the latest version of the N95 (the silver one with the black back that does not have a cover over the camera's lens; I got mine at the end of last year) leaves the backed-up data incompatible with the new firmware

- backup.arc is in a Nokia proprietary format, and there is no "decoder" or "converter" available for it

- just looking at this thread and googling this issue indicates that this problem is NOT indicative of "user-error" but rather points out a SERIOUS flaw with Nokia's firmware backwards compatibility / testing / work-arounds on its FLAGSHIP product

- this is a VERY expensive telephone (again, FLAGSHIP product!), and it's ridiculous to try to hack the contents of backup.arc by PAYING for a third party app that will make only partial headway into extracting the backed-up contents of the file

I then reiterated that three things need to occur:

1) If there is still the capability of upgrading from an older version of firmware to a newer but not-backward-compatible format, THE INSTRUCTIONS MUST SAY TO BACK DATA UP USING PC SUITE AND ***NOT*** TO THE MEMORY CARD

2) Nokia MUST provide a converter so that those of us that followed Nokia's instructions and backed up our phones to our memory cards CAN RETRIEVE OUR DATA

3) ALL future versions of firmware MUST be backward-compatible with ALL published versions of firmware

The Level 2 I spoke with was completely sympathetic and apologetic for all of these problems, and said that he would put in a suggestion for this, but couldn't guarantee the results. I once again asked for a response to my issue (left my e-mail as well as my cellphone number), and the Level 2 linked to this page in the suggestion.

So...this is my latest status on this problem. I would STRONGLY suggest to all of those that are experiencing the same issue to complain to Nokia. Reference this thread...it's on Nokia's own discussion board! Please post what you find out so that we can all stay on top of it.

[eng60340]

i upgraded my e61i and is also royally screwed.
if the phone backup function doesn't work. why put it there?

T.T
i hope some genius can figure out how to retrieve my calendar,todo,sms and contacts from backup.arc

restore data from backup.arc
/discussions/board/message?board.id=communicators&thread.id=20411

[saliharslan]

Problem after Updating N95 my phone doesn't work !
I updated N95 from V12.00.13 to V21.00.16 after some failed message I succeeded it but the screen Flashes and any activity!
I have no idea what to do ?